Such an extremely interesting phenomenon as onomatopoeic words or onomatopoeia is found in almost all languages of the world, but for some reason this topic is often bypassed when studying both native and foreign languages. In the Russian language lessons, these words are mentioned in passing, only when studying interjections. The two groups do have similarities, such as word formation problems.
Distinguishing interjections from onomatopoeia is very easy: the former express feelings without naming them - "oh", "ah" and so on. And onomatopoeic words imitate some kind of sound, for example, “clap”, “click”, “meow”, etc. Of course, such an imitation is not perfect, but as a rule, it is understandable to native speakers without additional explanations. It is also interesting that, not being, in fact, a full-fledged part of speech, onomatopoeia carries a certain semantics, that is, this "set of sounds" is not devoid of a certain meaning. In addition, the semantics of onomatopoeia does not change independing on the context, while the meaning of an interjection can only be precisely determined depending on the intonation and the language situation.
However, onomatopoeic words are very important, both in Russian and in other languages. It is with onomatopoeia that speech and the comparison of objects, phenomena, living beings with the words that designate them begin to form. For example, many young children will refer to a fall as "bang", and a car as "beep". In addition, sometimes such words become independent parts of speech, this is especially evident in the example of the English language.
It is curious that almost all the variety of sounds in the world can be put into onomatopoeic words. The examples are extremely simple - any child will imitate the buzzing of a bee or the rustling of grass, the barking of a dog and the bleating of a sheep. True, in different languages it will sound completely different, which seems to be an interesting feature of this phenomenon.
The equivalent of the Russian "crow" in French is "cocorico" and in English is "cock-a-doodle-doo". In addition, Japanese cats meow quite differently from Italian ones. The reason for this is thought to be the complex nature of the formation of the original sounds. Since the human speech apparatus cannot perfectly convey all the variety of rustling, creaking, rustling and buzzing, the only way out is to simulate them approximately, taking as a basis only some characteristic part of the sound. In addition, there is also a subjective perception of one and the samethe same sound by different people, which is why
onomatopoeic words in different languages differ from each other, but at the same time they have a certain common basis.
English in terms of the use of onomatopoeia is extremely interesting, because they are widely used in it. The buzz sound - buzz - passed into a noun and a verb with a similar meaning, the same thing happened with the hiss sound - hiss. And there are a large number of such English words derived from onomatopoeia. By the way, in Russian there are also cases when onomatopoeic words turn into independent parts of speech, but most of them belong to Internet slang.
